The Crush Rush Award for Loathing Limbaugh

Winner

Keith Olbermann (67 points)

“What was the more likely cause of the Oklahoma City bombing: talk radio or Bill Clinton and Janet Reno’s hands-on management of Waco, the Branch Davidian compound?...Obviously, the answer is talk radio. Specifically Rush Limbaugh’s hate radio....Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.”

Runners-up

Sarah Spitz (63 points)

“Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.”

— What producer Sarah Spitz of NPR affiliate KCRW said she would do if she saw Rush Limbaugh dying, in a posting to the JournoList reported July 21 by The Daily Caller. Spitz later conceded her comment was “poorly considered.”

Tina Brown (39 points)

“You started the year with this huge festival of hope and renewal and everything is going to be so different now, and then, like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Rush Limbaugh utters the words, ‘I hope you fail.’ ‘I hope he fails,’ he said, and from that moment, the sort of the Pandora’s box opened, and the rest of the year has been just this big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics and partisan divide and people shouting at each other and the Tea Parties and death panels.”

— The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown choosing the most important moment of the past year on NBC’s Today December 31, 2009. [MP3 Audio]

David Shuster and Eric Dyson (33 points)

Anchor David Shuster: “Many conservatives today reacted harshly to the action in Congress. But nobody on the right produced as much controversial venom this afternoon as Rush Limbaugh....”

Georgetown University’s Michael Eric Dyson: “If anybody is fomenting dissent, it is Rush Limbaugh, the politics of division, the cruel denial of the utter humanity of Mr. Obama....”

Shuster: “Rush Limbaugh creates this picture of fascism and Nazism on the march. And you then start to have people going out of control acting crazily on Capitol Hill, yelling all kinds of racist things at members of the Congressional Black Caucus, yelling hateful things at Barney Frank....”

Dyson: “This is a bigotocracy. I think Rush Limbaugh is trying to foment a universe of bigotocracy.”